Yu Guo I Ep #5 | Nourishing your essence part 1

i’m tasha hey listeners this is ghooni and you’re tuning in to dot jeff the podcast where we chat and explore all things on integrative medicine hi you how are you doing today i am fine thank you i just got up kind of do you normally have a morning routine when you wake up um i try to follow my morning routine it’s not happening every day but i recently i just started to do some meridian stretches it looks like yoga yeah it’s very an alignment to starting your day on a good note so i should probably introduce you for our listeners um so yeah we have you today she is a traditional chinese medicine practitioner and she is based in austria she specializes in acupressure and gut health issues in the modality of traditional chinese medicine to kick off maybe you can tell us a little bit more about traditional chinese medicine or tcm and share a little bit about your journey into becoming a tcm practitioner well traditional chinese medicine is yeah to shorten it up we don’t we don’t diagnose just your symptoms and act on it but we see the whole body we take different methods like okay having a look at your tongue or having a look at your face and then feel your pulse and asking you a lot of questions and then put them all together and looking for the source so we are looking for the cause why is there a symptom where does it come from and then to start there so it’s we’re diving deeper and trying to yes heal or keep the balance in the body so in terms of origins where of course it it’s revealed in the name but would you be able to tell us more about the roots of it and where it kind of started and how it actually spread across the world this healing system is around three thousand or five thousand years and yes tcm is or was always about living with the nature so living seasonal as we would say in the modern world now and yeah like here in austria or europe they’re also being approved by science like acupuncture what are some principles or pillars of tcm generally we have five main pillars in tcm which are acupuncture herbology queena massages qigong tai chi all these movement styles and then last but not least nutrition these are the main pillars and a very famous old ancient chinese doctor once said first modify the patient’s diet and lifestyle and only then if these do not affect a cure treat with medicinals and acupuncture meow was his name and this yes clears a lot of things you have to start with your daily routine your daily food and then we can talk about herbs and acupuncture because if the base is not in balance if the base doesn’t work why should some additional stuff heal you completely and we also have the five elements and we use them too in diagnosis do you mind just explaining what the five elements are yes so the five elements in tcm include the wood element and there are associated with the liver the gallbladder and then there is the fire element which includes the heart and small intestine and the earth element with spleen and stomach organs and then the metal element with our lungs and the large intestine and then the water element with kidneys and the bladder so i think i think that gives us like some context now so how do you use these five elements and incorporate it and what do you mean by nourishing your essence so nourishing your essence means that you have to keep yourself in balance so that your storage of your life battery let’s say don’t get empty this essence is stored in our kidneys and the amount of this essence is given by our parents so we were already born with it and they they support us a lifelong so when we’re sick having accidents burnouts or giving birth all these things are reducing more and more of this precious essence and to not waste it we have to fill us up every day with another source so we call chi energy is the qi and the essence the same thing the qi their energy that flows through our body is what’s keeping us alive moving it’s giving us warmth and the essence is the concentrated she that was given us by our parents before we were even born that’s like the batteries that were giving us it’s more precious because cheese that what we everyday use and this is what’s our safety chi so it’s like your natural energetic levels like your base level is that what your essence is and then your chi is how you absorb energy from your day-to-day ways of operating and in combination with your mind spirit and food consumption is that is that right is that a good connection yes yes okay okay so how does this tie into nourishing your essence you can imagine a candle and the the wax is our essence and the the more excessive you live the quicker and faster it will burn down and we don’t want that and the essence also predict how long we are living so the more you burn it down the more sickness you have the earlier you might not be here and it’s important to nourish your essence because if your your chi your everyday energy is low all these exercises you do it will demand from somewhere some qi some energy so it will go to our storage that we have our batteries and take this precious qi just for getting up breathing and doing some sports and we need this everyday chi to not go to our pressure storage and to empty it and this everyday chi we get through our food through our digestion because the spleen transforms this food into the qi that we need every day and that’s why we should protect our essence okay so like we are born with this innate energy bank and then we also have the cheat which is an energy source that flows through our body through our day-to-day lifestyle activities right so the combination of our our lifestyle choices and then what we consume impacts both but i guess the objective is to make sure that you don’t drain out the natural source that we are born with and to take action on the lifestyle choices so that that nourishes our essence yes yes exactly okay um what do your clients normally come to you for most of my clients are coming for digestion problems and since i’m specialized on women also menstruation problems nutrition is not so quick and fast to to change so they have to bring patience i also tell them be patient but what are some of the the causes that you see and especially related to to get help i mean i see a lot of people or women already informing themselves that’s very good but there’s a lack of basic knowledge you also have to know what can your food do with you besides then what vitamin abcdefg does so it would be also important to know the basic use of food so like in terms of gut health and digestive health right when your patients come to you what are the cases that they you know come or the package it comes in before you can diagnose the fact that it’s actually a gut health or a digestive health issue mostly of the clients they come with digestion problems and then i ask okay what are they let’s say flat to lenses they they have constipation so diarrhea pretty often or very simple they’re just being tired all the time this also can be a symptom linked to our digestion because if you’re tired all the time that means something is not working well in in your system and you can you can imagine your organs are always working together like like cog wheels and if there’s one not really working blocked slow or maybe too fast then the others will get irritated as well that’s an interesting one so if you’re tired your digestion might might pick up on the energy and the pace and is it is it fair to say that it will be slower as well the digestion speed um actually would be the other way around if your digestion is low you will get tired because all the things that you do like moving having having a job going there doing sports etc will exhaust you because there is not enough energy produced in your body for all these things and there’s also a very nice picture of how the digestion works in the tcm you can imagine a cattle okay a kettle that is it’s on wood fire and you’re putting food every day inside this kettle and it’s cooking a nice soup inside so in our stomach we put food in our in us and there’s there’s a nice soup cooking inside and the fire down under is the digestion heat digestion energy that we need for cooking up a soup and this digestion energy is provided from our kidneys too so they work together and as we said the kidneys are our essence storage and the vapor that is rising up from this cattle is our chi our energy that we need for yes moving and breathing etc now imagine you put food inside this cattle that can’t be cooked or processed well and it stays in there it thickens and it it’s getting sticky and this we call dampness or undigested food because we live in different countries and each body has his own history and so as we have this undigested food or dampness in our cattle also the fire firewood gets smaller and smaller because it’s trying to work it’s trying to burn it but yeah it’s getting smaller too it’s getting damped down and then we have this dampness we have fatigue flatter lenses stagnation looking at like the the analogy of of the kettle you were saying what are some of the causes that could overflow that cattle or have that fire not burning what are some of the things in our day-to-day that actually could affect those each person each body is different but in general we can say we shouldn’t eat too much cow milk products like milk products can cause a lot of dampness in old times it was very nourishing to give the hunter the milk and then he’d go out and hunt but now we’re sitting at home going to the office and drinking milk eating cheese cooking with all these products and it’s too much yeah plus like you know back in the day it was much more laborious living and surviving right so the food they consume would be burnt the energy would be used but today we just eat and then we go and sit in our seat for like hours right and how do you recognize a good guttel well a good digestion is when you eat something and have no flat lenses and you don’t feel tired after it if you fart too much then it’s there okay all right all right yes exactly i mean of course there’s some food that where you will fart but normally you shouldn’t fart after every meal i know people who are like oh that’s normal well it’s not it’s a symptom don’t you hear it but yeah okay so i never thought of it that way so okay so the the fart let’s use you know generic term uh do you look at the sound in that city the the smell i guess well i no um we don’t get that detail into farts just in i would ask more questions about the poop but not to guess other than farts i remember reading that having good hair and good nails are a good sign of digestive health is that is that true kind of you can say it because then we know all the organs the whole system is working but hair is connected more with our kidneys so the water element and nails are more connected to the wood elements so liver and gallbladder but they all need our earth element our middle our core so our digestion that’s true the if you have good nails or hair you have a lot of good quality of blood these are tcm terms as well and we need the blood and the chi parallel so chi can move around our body but it needs his partner the the blood i mean the chi is circulating and the blood is more the material side um and it contains all these vitamins and all that so going back to like how do we recognize a good you know gut health so we talked about lecture so you have a good digestion if you can poop every day best time would be in the morning and to get more into that if your poop is not too too watery like diarrhoea or not too hard like it’s making a sound when when it falls falling down into the bowl and it’s more like a soft eyes consistence then it’s a good poop because we need we need to empty ourselves every day if not it will stick in our body so we have obstitation that’s not good it needs to go somewhere whatever you eat it needs to go somewhere so you said in the morning but some people would go like twice and some people don’t go once so is there like a recommended frequency per day if they are eating twice or three times a day they should be going once a day if it’s twice a day maybe it was too much food if they’re not going at all okay was the food to dry are you not eating that much that would all be the following questions so so that the yeah the type of food will be kind of reflected in your book it’s the summary of how you treated your body with what and that’s the evidence yeah the summary and the evidence i love that i really love that so would you say that how your body reacts to your food is a sign to your digestive system in terms of your poop yes um you can also see it if when you’re having let’s say three meals a day and you don’t have too much munchies in between means okay you you have given your body the right fuel the right food if you are always snacking in between that means okay maybe it was lacking of proteins or oil fat that could be indicated as well if you are always looking for sweet stuff etc maybe there was lacking some in your last meal so if you’re constantly snacking you’re basically not letting your your stomach do the work that it’s supposed to do and and hence like get that fire going you’re not nourishing your essence yes you’re actually kind of telling the the essence the the wood fire to work constantly because when you’re eating it has to be digested and if you’re eating constantly then then then the body is working all the time we should leave between our main meals three to four hours of rest okay yeah and talking about tiredness if you are eating dinner pretty late your sleep will probably not be that good or you will wake up in the morning very tired why because your digestion was working all night when you’re eating at 8 00 pm or 9 p.m that could be a problem for me for instance i couldn’t sleep that well if i would eat that light right is that like a timing that you could see okay after this time of the hour like it’s better because sometimes you know you have those cravings at 10 p.m um yes then i would go one step back and ask again what was in your meal in your dinner what have you eaten how were you treating your yourself the rest of the day have you left out your lunch or your breakfast and then all the things when you’re getting home and you you’re relaxing all the things are coming back your body still demands it and then i would say okay for the first steps maybe drink plant-based milk instead of eating chocolate or chips right okay so you wouldn’t recommend to being strict with that would you say it’s okay if you like say skip that craving yes because cravings are is not the same as hunger it’s more psychology for me it’s more more in my head than in my body and of course i also have cravings and munchies but yeah i learned not to follow them and you can always take alternatives if that’s sometimes too hard because you had a stressful face like okay before it was chips and now it’s just chick beans that you made in the oven yourself and put spices on it so at least change the product to food it does require for you to see such a different light right because there’s something about munchies that you just want like that junk food or that sweet uh or salty packet of chips but it’s about like how do you create healthy munchies that you could refer back to when when you’re really craving something yeah and i think it’s like it’s it goes in principle with the entire tcm principles where you’re talking about mind body spirit and then your environment as well so requires you to have like a full presence even when you are stressed to tune in and say to yourself like am i actually hungry or am i just craving something because i’m stressed so it requires that unconditional presence as opposed to tuning out yes exactly so what are some of the teas you would recommend to improve your gut health um good for the gut our core is always the the taste of something sweet that’s connected with the earth element but with sweet we don’t mean sugar we sweet we mean like carrots if you chew that that’s that’s actually kind of sweet and potatoes and they are in the sweet list and for teas i would recommend lavender of course because lavender is always calming you down and licorice oh yes it’s because of that sweetness yes that would harmonize your chi uh in general and also would be satisfying for your gut so if you’re craving for sweet stuff you can also drink a licorice tea with lavender interesting because i i’ve never been a fan of licorice the taste is kind of funny for me yeah but lavender sounds great this is part one of a two-part episode with you check out our next episode where we talk about acupuncture and more on how to nourish your essence with that said if you enjoyed this episode go ahead and select that follow a subscribe button for now stay safe and we’ll see you next week